withdrawing all of the money he'd only just deposited in his account.

Stephen Leacock intended to make a very simple transaction at the bank, but he had never had any previous experience with banking and made a hash of it. He asked for a private interview with the manager of a large, imposing bank and then revealed that he only wanted to open a very small account. The manager, of course, assumed that Leacock was there on an important mission.

"You are one of Pinkerton's men, I presume," he said.

He had gathered from my mysterious manner that I was a detective. I knew what he was thinking and it made me worse.

Leacock explained his intended transaction in one simple line of dialogue.

“I propose to deposit fifty-six dollars now, and fifty dollars a month regularly.”

Leacock for many years was the most popular English-speaking writer in the world. One of the reasons for his popularity was his simplicity. It can be noted that "My Financial Career" is full of very short paragraphs and that the language is all conversational English. Another famous humorist, Robert Benchley, was so inspired by Leacock's writing that he once said he had written everything Leacock had ever written--not "read" but "written." In other words he had written on every topic covered by Leacock. Both men were obviously inspired by the great Mark Twain, an earlier author who wrote many humorous stories and essays characterized by wild exaggeration.

"My Financial Career" was published in 1914. Even in those days, fifty dollars was not a large sum of money--although it seemed large to Leacock. The manager turns him over to a clerk, who shows him how to open an account and how to write a check. In those days there was no distinction between savings accounts and checking accounts. A check could be written on any personal account. 

Leacock is so flustered by this point that he mistakenly writes a check for fifty-six dollars, although he had only intended to withdraw six dollars for present personal expenses. For some reason it didn't occur to him that he could simply keep six dollars of his cash and deposit fifty. The clerk is astonished.

“What! Are you drawing it all out again?”

An idiot hope struck me that they might think something had insulted me while I was writing the check and that I had changed my mind. I made a wretched attempt to look like a man with a fearfully quick temper.

This, Leacock claims, was his last experience with banking. As the title of the story suggests, it was the whole extent of his "financial career." Leacock, characteristically, is exaggerating wildly. He was a professor of Political Economy and chairman of the Department of Economics and Political Science at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. However, he concludes his story as follows:

As the big doors swung behind me I caught the echo of a roar of laughter that went up to the ceiling of the bank. Since then I bank no more. I keep my money in cash in my trousers pocket, and my savings in silver dollars in a sock.

"My Financial Career" is a short story written by Stephen Leacock. It follows the story of a man's very confusing first visit to a bank.

Right at the start of this short story, when the author tells us that the protagonist is entering the bank building, we read that the protagonist of the story "shambled in." This is a very interesting choice of words, as usually one would expect the author to use a simple and neutral verb such as "to enter" or "to step into." The verb "to shamble," however, conveys a lot more than just the mere process of entering a building. In fact, you might want to point out that "to shamble" is defined as "to walk awkwardly with dragging feet." Therefore, the fact that the author chose "shambled" instead of the other choices, which may seemingly have been more obvious, tells the reader straight away that the protagonist feels very insecure and nervous.

The narrator clearly isn't rushing to get into the bank; he is walking slowly and nervously. We know that the protagonist is very nervous when he has to go to a bank, as the author tells us this right at the start of this short story: "When I go into a bank I get rattled." The only reason why the narrator had decided to go into the bank was because he had received a pay rise, and he had felt that he should deposit this money into a bank account. Otherwise, given the fact that banks make him so nervous, he probably wouldn't have chosen to go to the bank at all.

“My Financial Career” is a short story by Stephen Leacock. The story is written in the first person and tells the reader about a person going to the bank in order to open a bank account. We don’t know why, but the narrator seems to be very nervous about going to the bank. This can be seen in the statement “when I go into a bank I get rattled.” This statement clearly indicates to the reader that the narrator is not happy about going to the bank: instead, it makes him feel very uneasy.

Despite his initial nervousness about having to enter a bank, the narrator perseveres with his plan to open a bank account with this bank. This is because he wants to deposit his money, rather than keeping it at home. Following a recent pay rise, the narrator now is in possession of a fairly big amount of money, which he feels is unsafe to keep any longer at home. Instead, he wants to have it held secure in the bank: he “felt that the bank was the only place for it.”

Unfortunately, his undertaking of trying to open a bank account goes wrong, mainly because he feels so nervous and anxious. The condescending reactions of the bank manager and the other bank clerk only increase this anxiety further. This leads to the narrator ironically withdrawing all the money that he had just intended to pay into his bank account. But not only that—he found his experience in the bank so horrible that he has no intention of ever using a bank again. Instead, the narrator tells us that he “keep[s] [his] money in cash in [his] trousers pocket and [his] savings in silver dollars in a sock.”